Last night I watched The Big Short — maybe the most important Hollywood film in years. This true story is a powerful and eloquent invitation to wake up to the sheer depravity at the core of the system of commerce.

The fact that the film got nominated for 5 Oscars including Best Picture is a huge sign that there are way more people waking up than we ever thought. The wrongs may not be getting righted as quickly as we’d like, but it is happening.

The reality of this shift is clearly evidenced by this news last week from Ontario. After years of obvious problems, Hydro One finally admitted that rural ‘smart’ meters do not work, and has decided to pull the plug on 36,000 of them — to start. We will see more utilities begin to do likewise. [UPDATE: BC Hydro just announced plans to remove 88,000 meters suspected of failure.]

Costing ratepayers billions, smart meters are actually designed to unlawfully harvest detailed data of the in-home activities of occupants without their knowledge or consent.

“I’ve been banging my head against the wall for the last five years, saying we’ve got problems with smart meters in rural Ontario.” Since first being elected in 2007, no single issue has attracted as much attention in his riding, he said.

For the purpose of clarification: at this time Hydro One is not planning to uninstall smart meters and replace with analogs — but rather to manually read rural customers’ meters quarterly, and estimate the months in between, because the wireless reporting is simply not working.

More than 10,000 billing complaints have been filed with the Ontario Ombudsman, and the Auditor General of Ontario released a scathing report, calling out the smart metering program as a total flop.

Hydro One was the first major utility in Canada to deploy so-called ‘smart’ meters upon an unsuspecting customer base. The price tag for rollout, paid for by the people of Ontario, was $2 billion — which was $900M over budget.

Go Green, or Go Greed?

For those new to this topic, here’s the skinny. Smart utility meters are being deployed worldwide under the banner of climate action. But they typically increase energy usage, and a high-level industry executive has admitted that the data collected by the surreptitious devices will be worth “a lot more” than the electricity itself.

Portland State University recently published a brilliant report on the morally-bankrupt surveillance agenda behind smart meters. The industry-gutting report is titled “The Neoliberal Politics of ‘Smart’: Electricity Consumption, Household Monitoring, and the Enterprise Form,” and excerpts can be read at Smart Grid Awareness here.

Customers are not being informed how their constitutional rights are being violated for the purposes of a for-profit home surveillance network. Nor how this technology has caused thousands of fires which have resulted in several deaths. Nor how our bodies are being affected by pulsed microwave radiation exponentially stronger than cell phones, as shown in Take Back Your Power.

If there wasn’t an avalanche of facts to back all of this up, it might sound too unbelievable to be true. But we live in strange times.

We Can Handle The Truth

Just like the banking system, the energy system has likewise become rotten to the core. To change both will require a complete overhaul and the embrace of a challenge to our comfort zone.

It is both harrowing and exciting for one to discover that there are major societal programs which are simply manufactured lies fueled by the idea of lack. That there’s not enough energy, food, resources, money. In reality, there is enough for all life to survive — and to thrive. It is provable fact that these truths have been suppressed.

There is a war on energy. When we understand the level of corruption involved, the implications are enormous. And we must act to solve this problem.

I believe that the suppression of solutions is a dam ready to burst. And I’m optimistic of our passing through this dark night successfully, as we are learning to connect and serve the higher good. There is really no other choice.

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Collective Evolution (CE) believes in creating change by thinking outside the box. We aim to challenge the current status quo by shaking up how we currently think about the world. We encourage and inspire each other to take action with the goal of bringing to life a bright future for us all. Learn more...